


And the World Turns 'Round

by Realmer06



Series: Pieces Universe [14]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Love/Hate, pieces universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 17:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Realmer06/pseuds/Realmer06
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astoria Greengrass has known she was to marry Draco Malfoy all her life. The only problem? She can't stand him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The following is a story that has been a long time coming. Draco has been a fascinating character for me since I read the seventh book, and I've wanted to do a character study for a very long time. This story touches on the Draco that I established in Among Thorns and Fighting Briars, and it also makes use of the Bonding Ceremony of arranged marriages that I created in those stories, but it is not necessary to have read those. Specific inspiration came from Harry Potter Fanfiction Community's Creepy Quotes Challenge.
> 
> Thanks as always to my betas: thesteppyone and Maggie, for encouragement and general ass-getting-on.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I own none of these characters. All belongs to the great JK Rowling.
> 
> This story is for Katie, to show that there are good Slytherins in the world and to thank her for sharing her fascination with Draco Malfoy.

_Part the First_

* * *

The day that Draco Malfoy turned three, young Astoria Greengrass (that would be me), all of six months old, was promised to him in a ceremony that she would never remember, and he just barely would. But it was the tradition – tradition for pureblood wizard children to be promised to one another by their families sometime before the age of eleven. Until the male, always the elder, reached that crucial birthday, the parents on either side could break off the arrangement for any reason.

The day that Draco Malfoy turned eleven, he and Astoria, age eight, went through another ceremony that took them from Promised to Sworn. In this ceremony, Draco and Astoria spoke for themselves, agreeing to their union, to take place in exactly nine years. On Draco's twentieth birthday, they would be Bonded, and on his twenty-first, they would become husband and wife.

It was a tradition as old as blood itself.

Astoria hated it.

Or, more accurately, I suppose, I should say: she hated _him_.

I had known I was to marry Draco Malfoy as long as I'd known my own name. My parents had made it clear to me from a very young age that I was extremely fortunate that the Malfoys had even agreed to the arrangement in the first place (the Greengrass family being noted for old blood and an old manor home and not much else), and I therefore needed to be appropriately grateful and do nothing that might jeopardize my parents' connection to such a powerful family. I did my best to be the dutiful daughter, but the more time I spent in Draco Malfoy's presence, the less I liked him. And I spent quite a lot of my childhood in his presence.

He was mean more often than not, and could be downright cruel when the mood took him. He was also the most spoiled and arrogant child I'd ever known, never without a little sneer on his face. He treated everyone as if he were above them, which, if my parents' opinions of his family were any indication, I guess he sort of was. But he treated everyone – even his mother! – as if they existed purely for his amusement, and those who failed to amuse him opened themselves to his condescension and derision. And I was one of those people. He made his dislike of me known early on, calling me "Baby Gweengwath" when he called me anything, and always loudly talking around me about how annoying he found little tag-along babies to be. Of course, in the presence of any of our parents, he was as polite as could be, but as soon as their backs were turned, his childish insults and rudeness returned. In short, he was a thoroughly unpleasant child, and without anyone to call him to order or correction, he grew quite naturally into a thoroughly unpleasant adolescent.

The day that Draco Malfoy turned eleven, the two of us were Sworn in a ridiculously elaborate ceremony. To anyone watching the pair of us, he appeared appropriately somber and solemn as we stood in front of the assembled guests in the Malfoy ballroom with our hands clasped over a basin of water while an officiate from the Ministry droned on behind us. But I was close enough to see that little sneer lurking at the corner of his mouth, and the slightest wrinkle of his nose as he looked down at me, as if I smelled unpleasant, which I knew wasn't true because my mother had let me wash with her special rose-scented soap that morning. As if that weren't enough, the very moment he had walked me solemnly out the center aisle of the Malfoy ballroom (in echo of marriage recessional), he dropped my hand and wiped his palm on his dress robes, making a face of disgust that no one but I could see. I wanted very much to scowl, but I was determined to be the more mature of the pair of us, so I merely straightened my shoulders and stood with my head held high, ignoring his childishness.

People began spilling out after us, and not at all to my surprise, Draco's little band of friends were first – Gregory Goyle, Vincent Crabbe, Blaise Zabini, Theodore Nott, and Pansy Parkinson. Now, protocol of the ceremony dictated that the Sworn pair stand and receive all the guests before seeking out their own amusement, but as soon as Draco's friends appeared, I could have predicted what was going to happen. They took the momentary advantage of the adults' conversation to steal Draco away, and he didn't even make a token protest about his duties, instead leaving me standing there alone. My normal emotions toward Draco were a mix of irritation and disgust, but as he turned to go, fury rose up in me, because _I_ didn't want to be there, either. _I_ didn't want to stand up in front of all these people and swear myself to a stuck-up boy I hated, nor waste an entire afternoon in good clothes talking to grownups, but we were _supposed_ to! We had _responsibilities_! And even at eight, I took that very seriously.

So I did what I had never before dared to do – I called him to task. Or I tried to. "Draco! We're supposed to receive the guests," I said angrily, and then his sneer was back in full force.

" _You_ do it," he said. " _I'm_ busy, and I have no time to stand around with _babies_." And he turned on his heel and walked away.

I _did_ scowl then, at his retreating back and his aggravating saunter and the shrill laughter of that Parkinson girl. I curled my hands into fists and wished I was bigger, older, stronger, able to _do_ something like knock him about the head— which is, of course, when my mother reached the doorway.

"Astoria!" she hissed in an urgent, angry undertone, her clawlike hands suddenly clenched painfully on my shoulders. "Do not scowl!" And then, louder and sweeter, but with the edge of a threat that only I recognized, "Where is Draco?"

"He left," I said, and tried not to let my anger show. I couldn't believe she was about to blame me for Draco's disappearance, but in hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised. "I tried to get him to stay, but he went off–"

"You'll have to excuse Draco, Helena," came a syrupy smooth voice as Narcissa Malfoy floated into view. "He and his friends have been talking non-stop about Hogwarts; they're all so excited. A stuffy event like this, you can't blame them for wanting to escape out-of-doors."

"Oh, of course not," my mother said, suddenly all simpering sweetness. "It's only natural; Daphne's been the same."

"Then I think we can dispense with formalities, hmm? Run off and play, Astoria dear." And with an infuriating pat to the top of my head, I was effectively dismissed.

And I went, but not quietly. Or rather, I left their presence quietly, but once I was away from the adults, I stomped and stormed and raged at how unfair it was that out of all the boys my parents could possibly have paired me with, they'd picked him.

I stormed outside and headed for the place that had become my spot at Malfoy Manor – a decorative stone bench in the shade of this massive oak tree a bit removed from the manor itself, and on the opposite side from the gardens and walkways. It was private and secluded, and a poor location for seeing and being seen, so it wasn't often used. Which was quite all right with me.

The quiet calm of the slight wilderness helped to calm me. I was still irritated, but it was nothing more than the irritation I typically felt at being forced to spend every June the fifth at a birthday party at which I wasn't really welcome. It was Draco's birthday, but every year, I was the one who made a wish: that this year, the Malfoys would finally decide that I was too poor or insignificant or insufficient to wed their son, and would therefore call the Bonding off.

And it was in that moment of lamentation that I suddenly realized what the morning's ceremony had meant, and more, that I was not quite as powerless as I had, up to that moment, believed. Draco's parents were no longer able to call off our Bonding because that power had now passed to us. I leapt up with great excitement, intending to head at once for the manor and break the news to everyone still assembled, but I was prevented by the arrival of my sister.

"I thought you'd probably disappeared up here," she said dispassionately, surveying the surroundings and clearly wondering how anyone could prefer the wilderness to the cultivation and company of people on the other side of the house.

"Why aren't you with Draco?" I asked her, and I didn't bother trying to hide my contempt.

"Because Father wouldn't let me slip out as soon as the ceremony was done, and then Mother sent me to make sure you weren't going to try and do exactly what you're trying to do," she said coolly.

"And what am I trying to do?" I demanded of her. She fixed me with a calm stare.

"Disappear," she said simply, obviously, and I couldn't argue and she knew it, and I hated it.

"Well, Mother and Father don't have to worry," I said primly. "As I'm going right back down to the house and calling all this off."

"Calling what off?"

"All of it. The bonding, the marriage, everything. I don't like him, and I don't want to do it." She stared at me then, but not as if I had shocked her. Rather, she was staring at me as if in disbelief that she could have so foolish a sister.

"And why on earth do you think that matters?" she asked me, which only angered me further.

"Because it does!" I insisted. "I won't marry someone I don't like!"

"You'll marry whoever Mother and Father tell you to marry."

"I will not!" I said again, crossing my arms defiantly. "I can call it off! That's what this morning meant!"

"And what are your reasons?" she asked, matching my defiant posture with an arm crossing of her own, which she somehow made adult and powerful.

"He's mean," I said immediately, "and cruel and beastly and he treats me like a baby!"

"That's because you're eight and he's eleven," she said as if talking to a simpleton. "Of course he treats you like a baby. You're sillier than you're acting right now if you think Mother and Father will let you call off a Bonding for those reasons."

"Mother and Father don't have a choice," I said, mimicking her patronizing tone. "Draco and I are the only ones who can call off the Bonding now, and I'm calling it off." And I started to stalk off past her toward the house.

"And how are you going to do that?" she called after me, stilling my feet. "The bond between you and Draco is legally binding, and you can't take independent legal action until you're seventeen. You have to have a parent's permission. And neither one of our parents will _ever_ consent to dissolve the bonding between you and the Malfoy family."

I knew she was right. I knew it, and I hated it, and I hated that I hadn't known that before. "That isn't fair!" I all but wailed. "Why would Mother and Father make me marry someone I can't stand?"

"Because the Malfoys are very powerful and rich, in ways we haven't been for generations now. Mother and Father want any connection to them they can get."

"Then why didn't they marry _you_ off to Draco?" I muttered spitefully, stomping back up the hill and sitting on my bench again.

"Because I'm older than Draco by three months, which you know full well. Don't be stupid."

"I'm not stupid!"

"Then stop acting like it," she said, refusing to let me have my tantrum. "Draco's only eleven. He's bound to grow up at some point. Now come join the party, and don't say anything about this to anyone else. Got it?"

I could do nothing but comply. Or, more accurately, I could do nothing sensible but comply. I could have raised a fuss, could have done my best to torment my parents until they relented. But I knew that such a course of action would be fruitless. It might give me some momentary satisfaction, but it would not be of much help to me in the end. And so, I acquiesced. I followed Daphne's advice, kept my silence, and hoped without much hope that Draco Malfoy would, someday, grow up.


	2. Chapter 2

_Part the Second_

* * *

The day that I turned twelve, Draco Malfoy humiliated me in front of the entire Slytherin Common Room.

My twelfth birthday was the first I had ever spent away from home. My parents told me I was staying over the holidays my first year because of the Triwizard Tournament being hosted by Hogwarts, but in reality, I was staying at school because Draco was staying at school, and my irritation at that fact overwhelmed any freedom I might otherwise have felt.

There is little to tell of the nature of things between Draco and myself in the three years that elapsed between Draco's first year and my own because we had really very little contact in that time. He was away at Hogwarts and I remained at home, and while we were encouraged to write to each other, we very rarely actually did and even more rarely had anything polite or worthwhile to say. We saw each other in the summers, of course, but the way that we treated each other then remained much the same as it ever had.

But then I started at Hogwarts, and was Sorted into Slytherin. This came as no surprise to anyone, as the Greengrass family had been in Slytherin for generations, but it came as no surprise to me for far different reasons. I knew that I was a Slytherin to the bone, as a child, and even now. I know what I want, and I will do whatever it takes to get it, and anyone who tries to get in my way should be prepared for a vicious fight. I am, at heart, a very selfish being. My first and foremost desire, always, is my own happiness, and in achieving that desire, I am never reckless, but practical, patient, and thorough, and it is only rarely that anyone else's desires or happiness will come into my consideration. I am fiercely loyal to those few souls whom I can trust implicitly, who know my whole self, but those souls are few and far between.

I was a true Slytherin, and I could go nowhere else, and the same was true for Draco Malfoy, though it was one of the only things we had in common. But contrary to my mother's deepest desire, that did not put us in any closer contact, really, than we had had before I started at school. We may have been in the same House, but there were three class levels between us, and Draco didn't want my company any more than I wanted his, the constant pressure from my mother to insinuate myself into his circle of friends notwithstanding.

It was that pressure that kept me at school over the Christmas holidays my first year. Almost all of the students above fourth year were staying, of course, because of the Yule Ball, but I was a first year, and so, there was really very little for me to do. Hardly any schoolwork had been assigned over the break, my classmates and I were all too young to visit Hogsmeade, and all the older students (including the third years, who were all clinging to the hope that an older student would ask them) wanted to talk about was the Yule Ball. Including, most unfortunately, my best friend at the time, Eileen Davis.

"Did you know that . . ."

I tried not to sigh when I heard those words as she sat next to me on the couch in the Slytherin Common Room. But I knew what was coming. Those words always preceded some Yule Ball tidbit – who was going with whom, what they were wearing, who had been slighted. Eileen knew it all, and wanted to share it all. Was it really so much to ask, I wanted to know, to go one day, one hour even, without hearing the latest news, or wanting the first words my best friend said to me that day to be, "Happy Birthday"? No one had taken the time to wish me one, not even my sister. My birthday had been completely overshadowed by the Ball taking place one week later.

But to complain would have been ungracious and mean-spirited, two qualities I have always tried to avoid, and so I bit back my sigh, placed my book to the side, and listened to whatever new piece of gossip Eileen had for me.

"Did you know that Draco Malfoy doesn't have a date to the dance yet?" was what Eileen had to say. That surprised me, because Pansy Parkinson had been telling everyone for weeks that she was going to the Yule Ball with Draco. I said as much, but Eileen shook her head, visibly biting back her excitement. "He hasn't asked her," she said, almost bursting. "Not actually. And I heard him tell Crabbe and Goyle that he isn't sure he's going to, because she's been so irritating recently. And she was right there when he said it, too!"

As soon as she revealed that, I immediately lost the slight interest that had awakened in me. I knew this game of old. I'd seen Draco play it with Pansy for years. "He's just baiting her," I told Eileen, going back to my book. "He's deliberately stringing her along so she'll be all the more grateful when he does ask her."

"You can't be sure of that," Eileen tried to insist. "I mean, aren't the two of you supposed to . . ." She trailed off suggestively and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

"We're Sworn. But nothing more than that. Salazar knows he doesn't take it very seriously," I muttered, assuming that the matter would then be dropped.

"You should ask him!" she said then, which brought my head up out of my book.

"Ask Draco?" I repeated incredulously. "To the Yule Ball? No, thank you."

"Why not?" she pressed.

"Because I have absolutely no desire to spend any time with him at all," I told her. "We've barely spoken in the past three years, and that's how I'd prefer to keep it."

She was silent for a moment before jumping up and saying, "I'm going to ask him for you!"

"What– Eileen, no!" I yelled after her, but she was already gone. Biting back a curse that would have made my mother turn pale, I set my book down and followed her, but I was too late. By the time I'd managed to find her and Draco in the crowded room, I caught the very end of Eileen's ill-fated sentence.

". . . so she was wondering if you had a date to the Yule Ball yet?" Draco's eyes flicked over to me as I approached, and I saw the tell-tale sneer form on his face, replacing the stunned incredulity that some unnamed first year would dare approach and speak to him.

"Well," he drawled slowly, "you may tell your . . . friend . . . that I do not." His eyes lingered on me in a way that made my skin crawl, but I refused to show weakness. Eileen turned to look at me, eyes shining with barely contained excitement, but I was focused on Draco. I had a feeling this wasn't going to end well. "However," he said, standing and moving slowly forward until he was practically on top of me. He drew the word out and looked me up and down until I felt utterly revolted, and then he looked past me and smiled a dark, satisfied little smile and called out, "Parkinson! You will accompany me to the Yule Ball, yes?" And without even waiting for her reply, he looked back down at me, sneering, and said, "I have one now."

The entire Common Room had grown silent at his shout, and so they all saw his response to me, and I knew that everyone was thinking I had just had the presumption to ask him to the dance. I was utterly humiliated, and he knew it. "What?" he asked. "Did you really think I would go to the Ball with a baby first year?" Then he laughed, and something in me just snapped.

"Like I wanted to go with you at all!" I shouted at him, and the Common Room's silence grew even more intense. "As it happens, I'm already engaged for the evening, but even if I weren't, I would never go anywhere with you, Draco Malfoy!"

"Do you really expect me to believe that someone has asked you to the Yule Ball, Baby Greengrass?"

"No," I said with conviction, drawing myself up to my full height. "We're having our own party. Right here in the Common Room. First, second, and third years only. Without stuffy dress robes or teacher chaperones. We'll have food and music and decorations because we don't need your silly party!" None of that was true, of course. Or at least, it wasn't true when I said it. I made it true over the next week because I was not going to let Draco Malfoy call me a liar.

"Well, you have fun," he sneered at me and turned and left, his cluster of followers trailing behind. Gradually, the hush left the Common Room, and Eileen hurried over to me, all over-apologetic mortification, gushing apologies left and right, and I couldn't take it anymore.

"Eileen, please!" I snapped. "For an hour, can you just leave me alone?"

A week later, we had our Younger Years only Christmas party, and I discovered that, far from being completely humiliated, I had gained some respect from the younger Slytherin students for daring to stand up for those of us forced to stay behind.

Take that, Draco Malfoy, I couldn't help but think in smug satisfaction. But there was a part of me that was inexplicably disappointed to find that, contrary to Daphne's suggestion, Draco Malfoy hadn't changed in three years – not one bit. _  
_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potential triggers in this chapter - non-con, though it doesn't get very far.

_Part the Third_

* * *

 

The day Draco Malfoy turned sixteen was the day he finally went too far.

In the year and a half since my twelfth birthday, Draco had changed not at all. He was still the same as ever, just as mean-spirited, just as cruel, just as much of a bully. But as he grew older, those characteristics were becoming less and less just spoiled child, and more and more those of a ruthless, cold-hearted tyrant. More the characteristics of a man like his father, which terrified me because Lucius Malfoy terrified me. But I was determined not to give in nor let Draco know of my fears in any way. I would be strong. Because, I had realized, I had an escape. I would turn seventeen six months before our Bonding. I would be of age before we were tied irrefutably to one another. There was hope, and that hope kept me going. And in the meantime, I simply avoided Draco as much as possible.

I spent the morning of Draco Malfoy's sixteenth birthday in much the same way that I spent nearly all of Draco Malfoy's birthdays – on the stone bench under the oak tree on his property, reading a book while the rest of his crowd ran wild on the grounds without me. I was invited every year because of my connection to him, but I didn't want to be there any more than Draco and his friends wanted me there. So rather than inflict my company upon them, I disappeared until the bell rang for tea.

Over the years, I had been discovered very infrequently, and always by my sister. None of the other usual guests desired my presence enough to miss me. But on this day, all that changed, because on this day the person who interrupted my solitude was none other than Draco himself.

"So this is where you disappear to every year," he said, and the first thing I noticed was that the tone of his voice was different than I had ever heard from him before. Usually, he spoke with a sneer or a drawl, but on that day, there was a tension in his voice that had never been there before, and he sounded angry. I supposed it wasn't terribly surprising, considering how his family had fallen slightly from grace after the events at the end of my second year, but it did catch me a little off guard.

"What do you want, Malfoy?" I asked without preamble, in no mood to engage in a battle of wits or exchange pleasantries. "And what are you doing up here? I can't imagine your absence will go unnoticed by your followers."

He made an irritated gesture of dismissal. "I've no patience for any of them," he said with a slight growl.

"And that means I'm supposed to have patience for you?" I asked through gritted teeth. His face turned a bright shade of red.

"You will watch your tone with me, Greengrass."

"No," I said flatly, meeting his gaze. I was through allowing him to bully me. "I will say what I please to whomever I please. You may think you're the ruler of Slytherin house, but you do not have the authority to order me about."

"You are a guest in my home!" he thundered imperiously.

"Through no choice of my own," I shot back. "So please, send me away. You'd be doing me a favor."

"You think you're so much better than us, don't you?" he sneered at me then. I gave an unladylike snort.

"That's rich, coming from you," I said, "who flouts his imagined superiority everywhere he goes and demands that the world bow before him. Well, I won't do it, so if that's what you're after, go back down to Parkinson and the rest of your groupies. They'll be more than happy to lick your shoelaces. Personally, I have better things to do."

"You're jealous," he said then, and there was a hint of satisfaction in his voice, almost as if he'd come up the hill specifically to try and goad me, but that didn't make any sense.

"Jealous?" I repeated incredulously. "Of what, may I ask?"

"Of Pansy," he said, and the smug satisfaction was definitely there that time. "And the attention I give her." I'm not certain what reaction he was expecting from me, but I doubt it was laughter.

"Jealous of Pansy Parkinson? Please," I said with derision, standing to meet him face to face. "You can have Pansy. And Pansy can have you. You're remarkably well suited. She'll never actually have to work a day in her life, and you'll have the simpering empty-headed trophy wife to come home to at the end of the day, who will do nothing but wait on you, tell you how wonderful you are, and provide the single-minded attention you can't seem to live without. No, Draco, far from being jealous, you would make every birthday and Christmas wish I've made since I was eight years old come true if you declared your intentions to marry Parkinson, dissolved our betrothal, and left me the hell alone for the rest of both our lives."

We were barely half a meter apart at that point, closer than I had been to him since our Swearing, close enough to reach out and touch him if the very idea hadn't been utterly repulsive to me. "You're thirteen years old. You know nothing about me," he snarled, hoping, I think, to intimidate me, but I was past being intimidated by the likes of him.

"You have no idea how much I wish that were true," I responded immediately. "But I am afraid, Malfoy, that I know far too well what you are."

"And what am I?"

It was a challenge, and I took it as such. I drew myself up to my full height, looked him straight in the eye, and said, "You are a coward." And I was the one to feel slight satisfaction then, as he flinched, almost imperceptibly, away from me. "And a bully," I finished. "That's all you've ever been, and that's all you'll ever be. You will never change."

"You're wrong!" he snarled, and for a brief moment, I saw something flash in his eyes that could only be likened to panic, but I pushed that strange thought away because why would anything I had to say to Draco Malfoy make him panic? Instead, I just looked at him with all the disgust I could muster and said, in a hard, unyielding voice, "No. I'm not. And let me tell you something else, Draco Malfoy. I live for the day that I turn seventeen, because on that day, I will go straight to the Ministry and dissolve every bond, every tie, and every arrangement that ever existed between us, because the idea of marrying you disgusts me, and I would rather die alone then spend the rest of my life shackled to a weak, bullying coward like you. And there is nothing you can do to stop me because you have no power over me, and you never will."

And I tried to leave after that, to punctuate all I had said by striding away, but I had pushed Draco over some unseen edge, and with a growled, "We'll see about that," he grabbed my wrist and pulled me roughly to him.

I was so shocked at the sudden physical contact that I barely registered what was happening when his mouth came down onto mine.

There was nothing gentle or loving or romantic about that kiss – it was entirely dominance and power and rough, forceful control. I was too shocked to move, or even to think coherently. I was half-frozen in place by a mind completely shut down and half-pinned in place by Draco's vice-like grip. That lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two, but it felt like an eternity.

And then, all of a sudden, my mind caught up, and I was filled with the need to get away. I struggled against his arms, tried to scream, tried to turn my face away or push him away, but he had me too tightly, his hands and mouth demanding and rough, and I couldn't escape. Fear filled me, then, and with that fear came a burst of energy and strength I didn't know I had. I got my hands on his chest and bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood. As he recoiled with a muffled exclamation of pain, I pushed him off of me, my right hand plunging into my robes for my wand, and my left hand curled into a claw which I drew across his face, all my fury and rage behind it.

He staggered away from me with a cry of pain and a ragged, "You bitch!" and took a step toward me to retaliate – until he saw the look in my eyes and where I had aimed my wand. He froze with his hand halfway to his wand, his anger mingling with the newfound fear in his eyes.

"If you ever touch me again, Draco Malfoy," I growled in a voice that shook with fury, "I swear on the blood of Salazar Slytherin that I will rob you of something the future of the Malfoy line is rather dependent on!" His focus was entirely on the wand aimed at his most tender of places, and I knew, for the first time, he was taking me seriously. Slowly he raised his eyes to mine, and the look he turned on me was equal parts hatred, fear, and anger, and he looked more than half-mad, with blood welling up from three long scratches across one cheek and trickling out of his mouth. "Go back to your silly little party and your silly little friends," I told him with all the revulsion I could muster, and though the look in his eyes dimmed not one bit, he turned eventually and did as I had said.

Only when he had disappeared entirely from view did I sink to the ground, shaking with disgust and fury and tears. My skin was crawling and I felt dirty, tainted from his touch. I gagged and retched as I remembered his hot mouth on mine, but I pushed the weakness away, determined not to show it over the likes of Draco Malfoy. I could not, however, stop the tears of anger and pain and repulsion that streamed down my face.

My sister found me there moments later, coming up the hill with somewhat alarming speed, calling my name with a level of concern I'd never heard from her before, at least not on my behalf. When she saw me on the ground, she rushed over and knelt beside me with no thought whatsoever to her robes, which spoke to her genuine worry. I'd have been touched if I hadn't been too full of other, more negative emotions.

"Astoria, are you all right?" she asked me. "I saw Draco coming into the house . . . he was coming from this direction, and he was bleeding, and he looked so angry . . ." She trailed off, unaccustomed to showing so much emotion and therefore uncertain about what more to say.

"I'm fine," I made myself say.

"Did he hurt you?" she asked. I hesitated only a moment before answering in the negative. "Are you certain?" she asked again, pushing ever so slightly. "Because if he hurt you, I'll make it so he can't stand up straight." That provoked a watery laugh out of me.

"No, he didn't hurt me," I said with more confidence.

"What happened?" she asked then, and the memory of the look in his cold eyes made me shudder, the laughter swiftly banished.

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "I've never seen him like that, Daphne. He's always been mean, but he's never been violent." She frowned.

"I thought you said he didn't hurt you," she scolded, her hand reaching for her wand.

"Not violent physically," I corrected. "Violence of spirit. Something's made him agitated, angry, and he came up here to take it out on me." The disgust overwhelmed me once more, and I shuddered, trying to shake off the feeling of his lips on mine. "He forced himself on me," I told my sister, and saw her lips tighten. "He kissed me, but nothing more. I put a stop to it, and told him what I would do to him if he tried it again. But I still feel so . . . defiled. Violated. And I can tell no one about it, because they will all tell me that, as my betrothed, he had the right."

I would have admitted that to know one else in the world, but Daphne, for all her faults and flaws, was still my sister, and I knew I could trust her absolutely. She was in very few ways affectionate, but she was steadfast and loyal. We rarely spoke heart to heart, but I knew if I ever needed to, she would be there. And in that moment, I needed to.

"I don't want to marry him," I said, and I tried to sound defiant, determined, brave, but my voice betrayed me, and I sounded only young and frightened. "I don't want to marry someone who treats me this way, someone I cannot respect, someone who looks on me with contempt and ridicule. I don't want a marriage like Mother and Father's. Why is that wrong?" I looked at her on that last question, and she met my eyes, her face unreadable. "Why is it wrong to want a marriage in which my husband isn't always walking out the door to a new mistress? You know that's what Father's doing, every time he leaves on one of his trips. I don't know how Mother stands it."

The bitterness in my voice surprised even me, I think. I mean, I was only thirteen, but I had known for years that my father was not faithful to my mother, that their marriage was based on social gain and not love. It was one of those things that simply was not talked about in my family, and a part of me was shocked that I'd brought it up in the first place, but once I'd started, I couldn't stop.

Daphne just looked at me for a long time, as if deciding how to respond. What she chose to say truly shocked me. "She stands it," she told me, "because his absence allows her to have her own dalliances."

I felt as if all the air had been stolen from my lungs. I stared at her, and finally managed to say, "What?" My sister nodded.

"As many as Father and as often. You truly didn't know?" I just shook my head, new tears pricking the corner of my eyes. I felt a mix of strange emotions that I couldn't understand – pain, anger, betrayal, humiliation, and more besides. It was too confusing to try and sort out, so I didn't even make the attempt. "I found out a few years ago. I asked her to be more careful about hiding it from you than she had been with me." There was a hardness in my sister's voice that I hadn't heard before, and for the first time in our lives, I got the sense that she was as discontent with our family life as I was. Then the angry tension left her face, and when she spoke next, her voice was laced with a resigned sort of sadness. "The arrangement suits them, though, or it seems to. They can play the perfect family in public, and in private, they lead the lives they wish to, and cannot use any discretions against one another."

"But what about happiness?" I demanded, my anger at my mother and my father and Draco all welling up inside me and exploding out. "What about love, Daphne? Why am I expected to resign myself to a life without it simply because they have? Why is it wrong for me to want to marry a man I can love? Why is it wrong to want what – what you have?"

My sister's face and features softened then, in a way they only did when she was with or thought about her own betrothed, Theo Nott. "Yes," she said softly. "I am lucky. I know it. I love Theo, and he loves me. But, Astoria, I am not naive enough to think that I happened to fall in love with the person Mother and Father paired me to. I found things in him to love. We both did. We make the best of the situation that is in front of us. It's all anyone can do."

"Well, I won't," I said, my defiance returning, cutting through the tumbled jumble of emotions. My chin raised and I set my jaw as I dared her to contradict me. "I won't marry a man who doesn't respect me, who would place an unwanted hand on me. I will not marry someone I cannot come to love, and there is nothing in Draco Malfoy to love, and I will not marry him."

She sighed and turned away, looking troubled, but she did not argue. "You cannot do anything until you turn seventeen, and even then, Mother and Father will likely disown you, you know."

My chin raised further still. "I don't care," I told her, and she smiled.

"I know," she said. "I've always admired that about you." She stood then, brushing grass from her robes. "And if Draco so much as brushes a strand of your hair without your consent, I will ensure that he lives the rest of his days in pain."

"You can have him as soon as I'm finished with him, should that day arrive," I promised her with feeling, and she shared one smile with me before setting off back down the hill.

I didn't follow. I needed to think, alone, about all that had happened to me that day. There was something about the incident with Draco that I couldn't reconcile in my mind, for disgusted and angry as I was with him, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd missed something, something significant. It all went back to what I'd told Daphne – I'd never seen him the way he'd been on the hill that day. The cool, unshakeable Draco Malfoy had been nowhere in sight, and something about his agitation rattled me. Because I couldn't help but feel that he'd come up to my spot on the hill not out of malice. Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't assign any other motivation, and so, I did my best to put it out of my mind.

Not until much later would I recognize the driving force behind his actions that I had missed that day – desperation.


	4. Chapter 4

_Part the Fourth_

* * *

 

The day that I turned fifteen was the day something finally changed.

In the very early hours of my fifteen birthday, I lay in my bed staring up at the dark green canopy above me, utterly unable to sleep. My life had turned dark and foreboding in the year and a half since Draco's sixteenth birthday, and I was not at all comfortable with the world I found myself living in. Yet I was a Slytherin. My parents were not Death Eaters, but they supported the Dark Lord's cause, and everyone they strove to align themselves with were Death Eaters, and powerful ones. If I had so much as voiced unease about what was happening in my school, at the hands of my teachers and Headmaster . . . I shudder even now to think about what would have happened to me. I need not try to imagine it; I saw it played out every day. It was appalling, what was happening all around me. It made me sick. But I was fourteen years old and only one girl. My dissent would help no one. And so, I kept my head down and my mouth shut. It was the only way to survive.

Part of me hated it, this enforced passivity. Part of me wanted to join Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood and find a way to fight back, but I couldn't. I was scared, and I am not afraid to admit that. The Dark Lord scared me and Headmaster Snape scared me and the Professors Carrow scared me. I saw firsthand every day what they could do, and I would have done just about anything to keep that from being inflicted on myself and the people I cared about. Unlike the Gryffindors, I do not believe that fear is a flaw. Not all of us are strong enough to lead a charge. I never spoke out against what was happening, but neither did I speak out for it, and I never raised a wand against another student. That I can say with pride. I did not stop the torture happening at Hogwarts my fourth year, but neither did I contribute to it.

But it still kept me up at night, burning inside with the injustice of it all, when innocent and defenseless twelve-year-olds were tortured in front of the entire school not as punishment for wrongdoing, but merely to make a point – oh, yes, it kept me up at night.

Such an incident had happened the day before my fifteenth birthday. A tiny twelve-year-old boy from Hufflepuff was Crucio'd five times by Amycus Carrow in front of the whole school as punishment for Neville Longbottom's latest act of defiance. The Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, and Ravenclaw students were all magically incapacitated so they couldn't interfere. The Carrows didn't lay a single finger on Neville that day; all they would have inflicted on him was handed out to the tiny, defenseless boy. Then he'd been strapped to Longbottom's back, and they'd both been sent wandless to the Forest for the night.

Every time I closed my eyes, I could hear the boy's screams of tortured pain echoing around the Great Hall. I could see the tears streaming down Longbottom's face as everyone in the Hall sat frozen, transfixed, either unable or unwilling to help.

No. I couldn't sleep.

And there was only so long I could lie awake, staring up at the canopy of my bed and listening to Eileen's whuffling snores. Before long, I had to move. And since my small room offered little in the way of space, I pulled on my dressing gown and headed up the inclined hallway to my Common Room, to pace out my sleeplessness where I wouldn't disturb anyone.

I was thwarted in my goal, however, for as I came around the corner, I discovered another sleepless soul, sitting in front of the giant windows that looked out into the lake. Normally, I found the underwater vista to be soothing, comforting, but that night, it seemed heavy and oppressive, like the water was pushing down on me, full of a freezing pressure that could very easily end me. The other person in the room clearly felt the same, for the air in front of him shimmered with a scene from above the surface of the water, the dark trees of the forest silhouetted against a moonless sky, their branches heavy with snow. But it wasn't the scene that drew me, nor the technically forbidden act of magic. It was the expression on the young man's face. His hands were clasped together in his lap, so tightly that his knuckles showed white, and his face was lined with anxiety, tension, fear, and desperation. It was that desperation that took my breath away. Whatever he was watching for, he needed it to happen.

"Draco?" I asked before I could stop myself. At the sound of my voice, the tension that was coiled so tightly inside him snapped. He whirled, the image disappearing as his wand came out to point directly at my heart before I'd had a chance to move.

He recognized me after a moment, and while he lost that panicked look, he kept his wand pointed at me, and we stood like that, frozen, staring at one another.

In the year and a half since his sixteenth birthday, we had barely been in the same room, let alone spoken to one another. I had avoided him steadfastly, and he hadn't made that terribly difficult. I'd barely seen him all the past year at school, and on the few occasions I had, he'd been tense and pale – paler than usual – and drawn and tired. Nothing like the arrogant boy I'd grown up with. I didn't know what to think anymore, especially not after Professor Dumbledore's death and Draco's flight from the school, and so it had been easiest to simply not think of him at all. The current climate had, in many ways, made that easier still, as for the first time in my life, I hadn't been invited to the Malfoy Manor for Draco's birthday. No one had – with the Dark Lord instilled at the Manor, Draco's coming of age had been all but unobserved – and that more than anything spoke to the drastic change our world had undertaken.

After a long, awkward moment, his wand hand fell to his side. "What are you doing here?" he asked, but his voice lacked the sneer it normally would have held.

"The same as you, I would imagine," I replied. "I couldn't sleep. What were you watching?"

"I wasn't watching anything," he said immediately. He was not a convincing liar. "I just – I needed to see the sky. All this water, I feel like I'm drowning," he said darkly.

It brought me up short, hearing him express the thought I'd had myself just moments before, and that may have been what pushed me into trying to draw out the truth rather than simply return to my room to escape further contact. That and, I had no explanation for the behavior I'd seen, and I disliked not being able to explain things.

"You were watching the forest," I said, and a muscle in his jaw tightened.

"I wasn't watching anything," he said again.

"Yes, you were," I contradicted, coming a few steps closer. "You were watching the forest, so intensely, like you were holding vigil or–" It dawned on me. "Were you – were you watching for them to come out?" It seemed so entirely unlikely, and only moments ago, I would never have believed such an action coming from Draco Malfoy, but now that I had said it, I could think of no other explanation for what I had seen.

His jaw was clenched now, and he was very pointedly looking away from me as he said, "And why would I do a thing like that?" But it, too, lacked his usual sneer. And then, much to my surprise, he went on, as if my question had unleashed a tirade that he'd been holding back too long. "Why should I, student of Slytherin House, give a damn one way or another about an innocent twelve-year-old boy being sent out into the forest with nothing but Longbottom for protection? Why should I care that this is what we've come to – torturing students who have done absolutely nothing out of place because of that very fact? Why should I spend a sleepless night over the fact that no one stood up to say that this is wrong? And why should I hold a midnight vigil to make sure that that innocent little boy comes out all right again, unharmed by the cruel and unfair treatment he suffered at our hands?"

His voice was full of such anger and anguish that I couldn't speak or stir at all. I could only look at him, astounded, astonished, and full of an emotion I never thought I would feel for Draco Malfoy. I was shocked at the outburst, stunned that he would make such an admission at all, let alone to me, but it was more than that. It was, most startlingly, sympathy. Pity. But even that lasted scarcely a moment, because the words had hardly left his mouth before he turned on me, his eyes locking with my own. Whatever he saw there released another wave of frantic emotion.

"Don't you dare look at me like that, Astoria Greengrass!" he hissed at me. "Don't you dare look at me as if I've done something noble. Something admirable. I'm not watching for them; I'm watching for me! I'm watching because if he comes out safe, then I don't have another person's blood on my hands! I'm watching because if he comes out safe, then my pathetic inaction hasn't—" He couldn't go on. I watched him swallow the words unsaid and close his eyes for a long moment, fighting against all the things that I had somehow unleashed in him. "I haven't changed," he said bitterly then, sinking back into the seat by the great windows. "I'm just as selfish as I ever was."

Though he had apparently dismissed my presence entirely, I kept watching him long after he had turned his focus to the lake beyond the windows. I couldn't have put into words what it was that kept me there, except to say that I couldn't simply walk away. The same guilt and self-loathing brought on by inaction that apparently plagued him plagued me as well. I had done nothing this evening while the Carrows tortured the Barnes boy. I could not stand by and do nothing once more.

So I made up my mind, and before I could lose my courage, I moved to the great windows and sat opposite him on another long seat. I waved my wand and the air between us began to shimmer until the night sky above the forest was visible once more. He stared at me. "I need to see the stars," I said simply. "I hope it's not an imposition." A silent understanding of sorts passed between us, and while the silence that we shared then was not quite companionable, it was also not awkward, which was a blessing in itself.

As I sat there, watching the scene in front of me, a voice inside my head was screaming, demanding to know what I thought I was doing, speaking to him, sitting beside him. After all, this was the boy I had sworn to hate and shun forever, had threatened to do great and lasting harm to if he so much as approached me. After what he had done to me, and had tried to do, he deserved nothing less. There could be no reasonable argument for turning around and approaching him, for feeling sorry for him, for wanting to spend even the slightest amount of time in his company.

But yes, there is, I argued with myself immediately. Something has changed. I don't know what, but something has. The way he had spoken to me . . . the Draco Malfoy I had grown up with would never have uttered those words to anyone, let alone me. He would never have shown such vulnerability, such doubt. I had to consciously work to remind myself that the young man in front of me was the same boy who had violated me two summers before. Something in him had changed, and I couldn't ignore it. Nor could I justify holding an old grudge against the one person seemingly willing to voice the reservations I'd held in secret for so long. Not everyone deserves a second chance, a small voice said in the back of my mind. But he seems to have earned one.

We held vigil together until the dawn light crept over the forest and the slumped, hobbled figure of Filch disappeared into the trees, only to reappear moments later, leading Longbottom, exhausted and scratched up, out into the open, a limp body cradled in his arms. Both Draco and I sat forward when we saw him, tense and holding our breath, but then the young boy stirred, and we both gave a subconscious sigh of relief. Asleep, we seemed to reassure each other. Not dead. Just asleep.

We kept staring at the image of the trees long after Longbottom had disappeared from it, until Draco said, in a voice so ragged and hushed I almost couldn't make out the words, "When did the war become about this?"

"About what?" I asked, confused.

"Torturing people!" he said intensely. "Torturing innocents, killing Muggles, killing—" He closed his eyes, looking anguished. "When did it become about this?" he whispered.

"It's always been about this," I said as gently as I could, for how could he not have known that? From his position in the thick of it, how could he not have seen?

He shook his head and swallowed. "Not for me."

"What was it about for you, then?" I asked with genuine curiosity.

"Purity," he said with an intensity in his voice that I had never heard there. "Just – holding ourselves apart, keeping ourselves – above. Avoiding the taint of — Not destroying them. Just keeping separate. Keeping our bloodlines pure. It was never about this." He looked me in the eye as he said it, and I recognized and named that quality I'd seen the summer previous – desperation. He looked and sounded so lost, so shaken, that a part of me gave way.

"I believe you," I said softly, and it was the truth, but he almost seemed not to hear me.

"I should have stopped it," he said. "This afternoon, I should have stopped it. I should have stood up, I should – I should have done – something! I should – I should do something, I should stand up tomorrow and speak out, and —"

"No," I said forcefully, an unexpected panic rising up at his words. "Draco, you can't." He turned on me then,

"And why can't I?" he demanded. "Why not, Astoria?"

"Because it won't do any good!" I told him. "They'll kill you, Draco. They'll kill everyone you care about, and then they'll kill you, The Dark Lord himself if the Carrows don't–"

"I don't care!" he thundered.

"Well, you should care!" I shouted back, refusing to give in to his anger. "Because even if they don't kill you, even if you should somehow escape them, Longbottom and Weasley and all the DA, they would never accept you! They would never trust you, and you know it. And you'll have used up any potential to help that you might have had."

He glared at me, but I knew it wasn't at me, not really. He held the fierce glare a moment longer, then looked away. "So I'm to do nothing," he said.

"You're to do what I do," I told him. "Stay quiet. Wait for your moment, the moment when you can do some good. The time when your actions will sway the course of the status quo. And in the meantime, speak of this to no one else," I warned him. "No one else can catch wind of your doubts. They'd turn you in in a heartbeat."

He seemed to recall all he'd been saying to me then, and he looked at me in a slightly different way. He gave the slightest laugh, little more than an exhale, and said, "And you, Astoria? Will you turn me in?" I held his gaze for a long moment and did not answer. In the end, he looked away.

We sat in renewed silence, gazing at the image of the forest now bathed in morning light. "It's your birthday," he said suddenly, and the declaration caught me off guard. I had almost forgotten.

"Oh," I said. "Yes, it is."

"Will you —" He looked suddenly hesitant. "Will you allow me to give you a gift?"

I stared at him, shocked. "You have a birthday gift?" I asked. "For me?"

"I do," he said, looking slightly embarrassed.

"Why?" I asked. "You know I would never have accepted it." He shifted slightly where he sat.

"I hoped," he said simply, uncomfortably. " – I hoped I might get a chance to – to show you –" He sighed. "I'm not who I was," he said, not looking at me. "I don't think I ever will be again. I have been unbelievably – naive." He said the word with disgust, and I knew he could pay himself no higher insult. "I – will you accept it?" he asked then, and when I did not answer, he said in a whisper, "Please, Astoria. I cannot make what recompenses I most need to. Please allow me to make the ones I can." After that, I could do little but nod, dumbstruck.

He pulled a small green box from the pocket of his dressing gown and handed it to me without ceremony. Silently, I opened it, and my breath caught in my throat. Resting inside the box was a necklace, a simple teardrop-shaped aquamarine set in silver and threaded on a delicate chain.

"The crystal is hollow," he told me, "and large enough to hold a single memory. It's empty. I couldn't think of one worth sharing," he said, a bitter quality lacing his voice.

"It's beautiful," I said softly, speaking around the lump in my throat. And then, because I felt the need to say something else, "But aquamarine isn't my birthstone, you know."

"I –" he started, and then stopped himself, looking down with a slightly bewildered smile. "I didn't choose it because it was your birthstone," he said finally.

"Then why did you choose it?" I asked, not lifting my eyes from the necklace.

There was a long silence, and then an apologetic, "Because it matched your eyes."

When I looked up in surprise, he had gone. I stared at the place where he had been, speechless, but then I smiled almost involuntarily. Briefly, I touched the pendant, and sank back into the cushions of the window seat, looking out at underwater vista that no longer looked quite so oppressive.


	5. Chapter 5

_Part the Fifth_

The day Draco Malfoy turned eighteen is the day we started over.

By this time, the war had been fought and won, the Dark Lord destroyed and his followers scattered and pursued to the very corners of the world. The tide of society in my parents' circle had changed dramatically, and those who had once held great power were now disgraced. My parents immediately distanced themselves from all former Death Eaters, quick as lightning to point out that they had never affiliated themselves with either side, and had never fought against anyone. It disgusted me, but I knew they were looking out for their own best interests.

I did not fight in the war. I was underage, and I had been told to leave, and I had done so. I know that many underage students snuck back once the fighting had begun, but I did not. I watched from a distance, in Hogsmeade, as my school fell into rubble, and the night sky became bright as day with spell flashes. I clung to my sister's hand and heard the Dark Lord's awful voice and waited with bated breath for the battle to come out one way or another. In my bones, I knew that that fight would decide the war for good, but I had no desire to be a part of that decision.

I watched and I waited that whole awful night, until the dawn came and the word flew around that Harry Potter had done it, that the Dark Lord had finally been killed, once and for all. The war was finished, and tears streamed down my face. It was over, I told myself. We had won.

The world changed so quickly after that that it made me dizzy. All who had shown complicity with the Dark Lord were captured and prosecuted as soon as they could be found, and only those who could prove that they'd not fought in his name escaped jail. That was Harry Potter's doing, and Neville Longbottom's. They said we could not give in to the temptation to serve our oppressors with the same cruelty they'd inflicted on us. "I will see justice done," Harry Potter said. "Not vengeance." He rose in my esteem.

But in the month that followed the final battle, I found myself filled with an anxiety utterly unfamiliar to me, for while my family's name had been cleared almost immediately, Draco's had not.

The question of what to do with the Malfoy family was one that was fiercely contested and hotly debated. On the one side were those who demanded that the Malfoys answer for every wrong they had committed, in both wars, instead of slipping away from punishment a second time. On the other were those who argued that since their fall from grace two years previously, the Malfoys had been treated like prisoners, and hadn't actively worked for the Dark Lord of their own volition in more than a year. Draco was meant to kill Dumbledore, the first side argued. Yes, but he didn't, the second stressed.

Knowing that this debate was raging made me, for the first time in my life, want to stand up and speak out on behalf of someone else. I wanted to tell someone that Draco had changed. That he hadn't wanted to fight, that he _hadn't_ fought, that he had wanted to join the Order's side, that I had talked him out doing so.

It was startling, the intensity of this desire to defend Draco Malfoy. I said nothing, of course, for I doubted very much that anyone would listen. But I agonized over my silence, and over what the ultimate decision would be.

It was Harry Potter who turned the tide, who spoke in the Malfoys' defense. He said that without services that Narcissa and Draco had performed, he could not have won. He did not elaborate beyond that, but the finality of his decision ended the debate, and the Malfoys were let go.

They were not jailed or punished by the Ministry in any way, but they had lost all the power they had once held, and the society that they had once reigned over now shunned them. They had fallen from grace irrefutably, and everyone knew it.

Now that any association with the Malfoys was seen as tainted, my parents were most desperate for me to do as I had once dearly wished to do and call off my Bonding with Draco. And a part of me agreed with them. A part of me wanted to push away the burden I'd carried for so long, especially now that I knew no one would oppose me. But there was another part – a part that hesitated.

The feelings I had toward Draco during this time are difficult to put into words. I was not quite able to truly call us friends, but we were something rather more than mere acquaintances. The past half a year had essentially erased the fifteen that had come before. I did not hate him, not any more, but I also didn't know enough of the new Draco to know whether or not I liked him.

 _He's changed_ , the hesitating part of me whispered in my mind late at night. _For good or ill, he's not the person he was. Doesn't he deserve the chance to recreate himself into something better?_ Wait, that part of me urged. Wait and see what he becomes. Wait and see if he is someone you might someday call a friend.

And this I did, though it frustrated my mother to the point of near loss of composure. Not that this was an added benefit in any way. But in all honesty, I scarcely registered my mother's opinions. I knew my own mind, as I always had, and my decision was made. I waited and I watched. And I bought him a birthday present.

That was a thing I agonized over almost as much as whether or not his name would be cleared. The choosing of it, the purchase of it, whether or not I would even present it to him, all these things I wrestled with in my mind, at times fully believing that my gift was necessary and perfect suited, at others convinced that such a gesture was ridiculously childish, to say nothing of the gift itself.

It was a pocket watch, a simple silver pocket watch, with his initials engraved on the outside. All pureblood boys were given a pocket watch upon their coming of age, usually a family heirloom, so I knew it was highly unlikely he didn't already own one. But I thought he might wish for one with no history attached, and so I bought it, and, in an uncharacteristically impulsive moment, had the jeweler engrave a simple message inside as well. _To new beginnings_ , was all it said, but I agonized over the words as soon as they were etched into the metal until the only thing that would calm me was to reach up and touch the pendant at my throat and feel the soft pulse of the memory of that night in the Common Room inside it, like a living thing. Draco's token calmed me as little else did, and it offered the resolve I needed to return his gesture in kind.

And so, with his gift weighing heavy in my pocket, I went to the Malfoy Manor on Draco's eighteenth birthday, four days after his name had been cleared, to see him for the first time since the battle and to speak with him for the first time since my birthday five months before.

Narcissa opened the door when I knocked, which was the first surprise of my visit. I'm fairly certain that Narcissa Malfoy had never opened the door of her own home prior to that point. Her face was tired and drawn, and there was a heaviness about her that was new. "Hello, Astoria dear," she said softly, and just like her son five months ago, the usual sneer was gone from her voice, replaced with an immense and unmoveable sadness.

"I've come to see Draco," I said uncertainly. She closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, like I had just confirmed her worst suspicions, and then she nodded.

"Of course," she said with a sad little smile. "I want to thank you for coming in person," she told me then. "We've been expecting it, of course, but to come yourself . . . that shows true class." I was utterly bewildered, but I didn't get a chance to voice it. "Unfortunately, Draco is not here," she said. "He left a few days ago, as soon as our name was cleared so it wouldn't appear as if he were running away. He's gone on a world tour."

The news stunned me. It was the last move I had expected from him, though now that she'd said it, it made a certain amount of sense. "Do you know when he'll be back?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not," she told me. "And I know it's too much to ask to wait to break it to him until he's back, but I would ask you to be gentle. As I said, he's expecting it, but . . ." She trailed off, and I still had no idea what she was talking about.

"I'm sorry," I told her, "but I don't understand—" Then it dawned on me. She, like my own mother, was talking about the Bonding! "You think I'm here to – oh, no, Mrs. Malfoy, that wasn't my intention at all! I merely came to wish Draco a happy birthday, nothing more." She smiled then, with a hint of her old indulgence towards the foolishness of children coming through.

"Of course, dear," she said, as if perfectly willing to humor me. She was more than happy, she communicated silently, to pretend as if I hadn't come to Malfoy Manor to call off my Bonding to Draco, if that's what I really wanted. It was mildly infuriating.

"Truly," I insisted. "I have a gift for him, and I wanted to give it to him in person, but I suppose the post will have to do. Can you tell me where he's staying?"

"With the Ridgeton family," she said after a slight hesitation. "In Wales. They're friends of ours, from before –" She broke off, a small frown creasing her brows. "Well, it doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Thank you again, Astoria dear, for coming." I nodded, and she closed the door. I knew she didn't believe me. I knew she was fully convinced that I was about to write and tell Draco that everything between us was at an end, but truly, that had never been my intention.

I sat in my room that evening, staring at a blank piece of parchment for the longest time, twirling my quill over and over in my hands as I debated fiercely with myself over what to write, or even if I should write at all. He'd left, part of me said. Maybe he wants to disappear entirely. Maybe I should let him.

But I couldn't. For reasons I didn't fully understand and didn't want to decipher, I couldn't let Draco Malfoy disappear, not if I had the power to bring him back. I hadn't spoken to Draco at all since my fifteenth birthday, but a connection had still been forged that night, one I couldn't deny. We knew what words had been uttered, though we dared not utter them again. When we felt overwhelmed by the torture we saw, when we stood on the brink of not being able to stand the horrors a moment longer, we had only to look toward each other, to lock eyes across a crowded room. In those simple, shared looks, we knew that most precious of facts: we were not alone.

In the end, it was that truth that prompted my reply. I needed, still, to know that I was not alone. I suppose, on some level, I needed him to know it, too, but it was for myself and my own peace of mind that I acted.

 _Draco_ , I finally wrote.

_I went to your home this morning to wish you a happy birthday, only to be told that you have left the country. Your mother said you've gone on a world tour. I envy you. Would that such an escape were available to me as well. You will get to see the world, to travel and meet people who know little of your past and your supposed politics. Yes, I envy you, but I do not begrudge you. See the world, Draco. Escape. I do not begrudge you the opportunity. I would not even, I do not think, begrudge the decision to stay always away. To never return to this place that holds such animosity in your mind. I would only remind you, should that choice come to you some day, that there is at least one person here who would feel your absence and judge it as a loss. There is one person here who will, for as long as you are gone, keep watching the horizon and hoping for your eventual return._

_I am enclosing the gift I intended to give you this morning. It is nothing very grand, merely a token for your birthday. I hope that it serves as a reminder of sorts, and a connection to those you've left behind, those who ask nothing from you other than the knowledge that they have not also been left alone._

After much deliberation, I signed it merely, _Astoria_.


	6. Chapter 6

_Part the Sixth_

* * *

 

The day that I turned seventeen was the day that my future was decided. I was returning home for the Christmas holidays that year not out of any desire on my part, but because my mother was, against my express wishes, throwing me a Coming of Age Ball. I was angrier with her upon discovering this than I had been with her in quite a long time.

"I cannot believe, after everything that has happened, to our society, to our world, that you are honestly going to dress me up and parade me around a ballroom like some kind of oversized doll!" I raged at her.

"You are a young lady of breeding, and by Merlin, you will act like it!" she shouted back at me. "In three days, you will celebrate your coming of age in the traditional pureblood fashion —"

"My god, we fought a _war_ because of traditional pureblood fashions – were you not paying attention?"

"— and so help me, Astoria, if you embarrass this family in any way, you will severely regret it! You will be surrounded by your friends—"

"And my betrothed?" I demanded, changing tactics. "Have you invited him? For it is pureblood tradition for me to dance with my intended at midnight, is it not?" I had the satisfaction of seeing her lips tighten.

"Your . . . _betrothed_ —" she positively _sneered_ the word "— is out of the country, and I highly doubt he will be able to make it."

"You haven't even asked him," I challenged. "Because all you care about are appearances! Well, I am sorry! But I cannot live my life so shallowly! I care about what things _are_ , and this idea you've come up with is the most preposterous I've ever heard from you, and I will not be a part of it!" And I turned on my heel, ignoring my mother's heated protests, and stormed up to my room, locking myself in, fuming.

I was so angry with her that I couldn't see straight. Had the war truly meant so little to my parents that they could fall so easily into their old lifestyle as if it had never happened?

Without hesitation, I did what I had come, in the past year and a half, to do when I was this overcome with emotion – I wrote a letter. I wrote about what had happened and how angry I was and how ridiculous I found the whole situation to be. And at the letter's end, I voiced the overwhelming fear that the encounter had awoken in me:

_I am filled with panicked despair at the thought that we might be so shortsighted. The war is less than two years in the past, and already I see so much of pureblood society slipping back into their old, familiar ways. How can I reconcile living with people who are so blind? If nothing has changed, what was all that fighting and anguish for? I am overwhelmed with fear when I think about how quickly the world might revert to the way it was before, not out of malice, but out of sheer indifference. And once that has happened, how far away can we be from reliving that terrible nightmare?_

I sent the letter to the one person I knew would understand. Though I knew I wouldn't receive a response for several hours, the very act of writing the letter calmed me somewhat. And when Draco did reply, his words calmed me further.

_In the aftermath of any war, there will always be those who feel the war had no effect on them, that it was fought for reasons outside of their personal spheres. You are more clear-sighted. Would it be easier in this instance if you were not? Most likely. But I think you would argue that an easier life is not worth the tradeoff._

_The world rests in a precarious place just now, as we try to recreate ourselves and make decisions about what kind of new world we will ultimately be. The clear-sighted like you, who struggle daily with the same fears that you have expressed, are instrumental if changes are truly to be made. I urge you to take comfort in this: that if this war should be fought again in our lifetime, you and I will be on the correct side._

_In the meantime, live for the day when you can make your own way in the world and need not be dependent on your family. Keep peace, Astoria, however you must. You told me once that sometimes, we must keep our silence until the moment is right for action. The moment is not yet right. So for one evening, put on a pretty dress and pretend that you still buy into your family's outdated notions of superficiality. It will not be easy, but you have chosen to live a harder life, and frankly, the world is better for it._

_Draco_

I sat staring at his words in the early hours of the morning, taking comfort in the familiar writing, the tone I had come to associate with him in the year and a half that we had been exchanging letters.

For he had written a response, much to my surprise, to my first letter on the occasion of his birthday. It had contained little more than thanks for the gift and a politely expressed surprise that I had taken the time to write in the first place, but that was something, and it was enough to begin a conversation.

In the beginning, the letters were commonplace enough, and exactly what one might expect. He wrote me of his travels, where he was going, what he was learning, who he was meeting. In return, I told him of the changes being wrought in England and at Hogwarts, how the rebuilding of the school was coming, who the new teachers were, and how Slytherin had shrunk to barely half the size of the other houses and gained only three new students out of the entire incoming class.

There was an interesting note of caution in those early letters, a testing of the waters as we both tried to figure out the friendship emerging between us and where its boundaries lay. But those boundaries were completely eradicated in one letter from him that he hadn't meant to send, a letter that came late at night, full of anguish and despair, self-loathing and self-doubt. What he was supposed to be doing was hopeless and his past was insurmountable and it didn't matter what he did now, he could never atone for the things he'd done wrong in the past. He couldn't sleep and he had no one to confide in and the only thing he could think to do was write this letter to me, even though he knew he didn't deserve to have me as a confidante after the way he'd treated me and the things he'd tried to do, which were just one more thing he could never overcome. He could never earn forgiveness, he wrote, which was just as well, for he didn't deserve it.

The raw emotion and honesty in that letter left me breathless. Their intensity was overwhelming, and I could barely imagine the state he'd have had to be in to send such a letter. For the first time, I wondered if he might not be doing something else on his supposed world tour, for he'd spoken of failure, and yet, how could one fail a world tour? I pushed that thought aside, however. It was none of my business, after all, and there were more pressing matters to deal with. The trouble was, I had no idea how to go about responding to his letter. I knew only that a reply was needed. It was the second letter that provided my direction, the letter that arrived the next morning to apologize for the first. He had written it, he said, at the end of a long and tiring day, after receiving some very distressing news. The act of writing the letter to organize his thoughts was excusable, but sending it to me was not, for he had no right to burden me with his problems, and for that, he humbly begged my forgiveness.

That irritated me. I hadn't really had any close friendships before, but my understanding was that one of the perks of them was having someone there to help you through your troubling times. The second letter had been far more formal and closer to his usual tone, but underneath was a fear that I could read clear as day – that he'd somehow scared me away with his honesty. The notion was utterly ridiculous and actually a little insulting, and I was determined to thoroughly disabuse him of it.

It took a few more rounds of letters, but I did finally manage to convince him that he could write to me when he was having a bad day and I wouldn't hold it against him, provided that he was willing to offer the same service to me. _I might even, every once in a while, be able to help,_ I wrote. _Even when I have no helpful advice to offer, I am an ear in which to rage or cry or voice deep fears, and I am happy to be so. You are only human, Draco, for all that you seem determined to pretend to be otherwise. If you consider me to be a friend, then trust me with your good days and your bad._

After that, our letters took on a different tone. The veneer of societal politeness disappeared, and truer versions of our selves were collected on the page. We vented frustrations, voiced fears, and allowed ourselves to truly get to know one another. Draco became real to me for the first time in my life. That initial anguished letter was the closest he came to apologizing for the events of his sixteenth birthday, and the letter I wrote in response was the closest I came to voicing my forgiveness. For I had forgiven him, in a way. I did not forgive sixteen-year-old Draco for the act itself, but I forgave the man Draco had become for the person he had once been. Through our letters, we became equals, then friends, then the closest of friends. With each letter, I came to know and understand him better, and with each letter, I came to care for him more and more deeply until the day came when I realized that, at some point in the process, I had fallen in love with him.

That fact shocked me to the core when I first realized it. It was several months after we had begun writing, and I sat frozen, stunned, staring at the letter in my hands that had prompted the realization. And then, I had to laugh. Laugh at the universe and the tricks it plays, laugh at the omnipotent being who was, I was sure, somewhere laughing at me for falling in love with the one person I had once hated most. Suddenly, I was the princess in the classic story, who hates the prince she is to marry and falls in love with a peasant boy, only to find that the peasant is the prince and she had loved him all along. Except that I hadn't loved Draco all along.

I did not fight being in love with him – the Draco I knew in the letters was perfectly worthy of my love. But I also did not act rashly with false hope, assuming that happily ever after was now ours. Loving him was a fact of my life, and I dealt with it accordingly. I let it be. I spoke of it to no one. I kept writing. I never lost sight of the fact that what I loved was a voice on paper, that the man might be vastly different, and so I longed for Draco's return and the time when I could meet with him face to face and see for myself exactly what kind of man he had become.

As if Fortune were smiling on me, Draco returned to England the night before my seventeenth birthday, a mere two days after his last letter. I found out not from him but from Daphne, who'd had the news from Theo. She told me the morning of my birthday, and despite the fact that I had a fitting and a hair-dressing and twelve other things on my schedule for the day, I grabbed my cloak and headed for the door without a second thought.

"And what am I supposed to tell Mother when she asks where you are?" Daphne called after me.

"Tell her whatever you like," I said. "Tell her the truth for all I care. Tell her my dress robes already fit and I know the dances by heart and I can do my hair in twenty minutes, but that right now, I have more important things to tend to." I had done what Draco advised, and I had made peace with my mother, in that I was allowing her to throw the ball and I was even planning on attending, but I refused to be my mother's puppet if there was something more worth my time.

"Astoria," Daphne called again, and when I turned around, she said only, "Be careful, little sister."

"Daphne," I said, touched and exasperated by the warning, "I told you. He's not who he was. He's—"

"Changed," she said with me. "Yes, I know. And I trust you. But I don't trust him. Older sister's prerogative." I had to smile at that.

"Thank you," I said, and Apparated for Malfoy Manor before anyone else could stop me.

Once more, Narcissa opened the door. She looked at me as if she were not surprised to see me, but there was more in her look as well. There was a respect that I'd never seen, that came out of, I imagined, the fact that I had not called off the bonding in the year and a half Draco had been gone. There was hope, warring with resignation, and there was a wariness, because I was an unknown entity she hadn't anticipated. She didn't know my purpose and couldn't guess it, and that made me ever so slightly dangerous.

"I'm here to deliver an invitation," I said gently. "Nothing more."

She nodded slowly, deciding, for that moment at least, to believe me. "He's in the study," she told me, and turned and led me there. "Draco?" she called softly from the doorway. "You have a visitor." And then she left us alone.

He did not immediately turn around, and so my first view of him in eighteen months was of his back. He was leaning over a desk, writing a letter while an official and important looking owl sat waiting on a perch by the window. I took stock of both Draco and the situation while I, like the owl, waited for him to finish writing.

His hair had grown long, and what I could see of his skin was darker than it had been two years ago. He sat over his work, his posture as straight as ever, but there was a heaviness and a surety to his movements that was new. Standing there, watching him, my heart began to beat faster, but I firmly told it to settle down, for such nonsense was beneath it.

Presently, he finished writing, sealed his letter, and presented it to the owl, who ruffled his feathers importantly and took off through the open window. He pulled a watch out of his pocket then and checked the time, and with a start, I realized that it was the watch I had given him. He closed it, replaced it in his pocket, and then, Draco turned.

He stood with his hands behind his back, and, like his mother before him, did not look at all surprised to see me. "Astoria," he acknowledged with a nod and a slight smile. I took stock of his face. He looked tired but not stressed or distressed; it was a good day for him.

"So, were you planning on informing me that you were back in the country?" I asked of him. I refused to act as if we were mere acquaintances, and so I displayed to him all the openness I used in my letters, in the hope that I could prompt him to do the same. "Or were you just planning on allowing me to continue writing letters to you as if you were halfway across the world?"

"Well, you seem to have discovered the information on your own without much trouble," he said.

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Yes, it does," was his immediate response. "Returning to the country after a year and a half abroad means that my time is, unfortunately, not my own, so if I could be reasonably assured that you would come by the information without my help, it does not follow that I would spend valuable time informing you of facts you would already have."

"But how would you come by these reasonable assurances?" I challenged. There was a playfulness in our exchange that had never been there before. Our conversation was as close to banter as I'd ever shared with anyone, and I found it quite exhilarating. I was thrilled to learn that the slight hint of teasing that had emerged in our letters only in the past few months or so translated so easily to in-person exchanges.

"I assumed Theo would tell Daphne and Daphne would tell you," he said then, and upon seeing the look on my face, he smiled just the tiniest bit. "Were those not the links in the chain of communication?"

"That is entirely beside the point," I informed him, which earned a genuine smile – _smile_ , not sneer – for he knew, as I did, that he had won the first round of banter. "It is the principle of the matter," I continued. "You wrote me not two days ago. You could not have included your return in that letter?"

"Ah, but you are assuming that, two days ago, I knew I would be returning." My heart, infuriatingly, quickened at that.

"Are you not back to stay, then?" I asked, and the conversation took on a more serious tone, the playfulness gone. He hesitated for a moment before he answered.

"I am back for the foreseeable future," he said.

"What, and then you leave on a second world tour?" I asked. It was a challenge, designed to let him know that I knew there had been more to his travels than he was telling. He did not take the bait, but then, I hadn't truly expected him to. Instead, he changed the subject.

"What is your business here?" he asked cordially.

"Is it not possible that I came merely to see you?" I asked, stalling for time, for now that I was face to face with him, I was beginning to grow nervous about my reason for coming.

"It is possible," he agreed, "but you haven't. What has brought you here, Astoria?" There was gentleness in his tone, a mild concern that nearly undid me. I could tell he was worried that something had happened to upset me. Nervous as I was, I couldn't quite allay his fears with a smile or a gesture, so I pushed valiantly forward with what I had to say.

"It's my birthday," I said.

"Yes, so it is," he said, as if just remembering. "Happy birthday. I hope you will forgive me. Your gift is . . . still en route. I returned before much of my luggage."

I watched his face carefully as he said this, and had him caught. "That," I said, suppressing my smile, "is a downright lie. You forgot all about my birthday and so have not yet bought me a gift. You are stalling for time and giving yourself an extra few days to find something." I ignored his gaze lingering ever so briefly at the pendant resting at my throat, and after a moment, he smiled and raised his hands.

"I will admit nothing," he said.

"Well, it doesn't matter," I told him. "There's a gift you can give me immediately, and you needn't spend any money at all."

"And what might that be?" he asked. The question ended my renewed playfulness and brought my nerves back in full force. I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak.

"I have done as you suggested," I told him. "I have made peace with my mother over the ball, of a sort. I have done everything she's asked – well, I'm supposed to be at a fitting right now, but I have gone along with everything else. And I . . . well, I want you to be there."

He raised an eyebrow. "At your fitting?" he asked with feigned misunderstanding. I gave him a look.

"No, at the party," I corrected with a roll of my eyes.

He turned and focused on something out the window so that I could see only his profile. "I cannot imagine you come on your mother's behalf."

"Of course not," I said, almost impatient. "You know she doesn't want you there."

"Then I wonder why you've offered the invitation," he said softly, still not looking at me.

"Because _I_ want you there," I stressed, on the point of exasperation now, and when he didn't reply, I felt the need to find more to say. "The night is going to be utterly unbearable; you know it as well as I. But you . . . your presence will make it less so."

He gave the smallest breath of a laugh then, humorless, and said, so softly I almost didn't catch it, "You don't want me at your party."

I almost threw my hands up in exasperation then. "No," I said sarcastically. "Of course not. You're right, you found me out. I came all the way over here to offer an invitation I had no intention of following through with."

"This isn't what you came here to discuss," he said suddenly then, ignoring my outburst. "The invitation was one small goal, but it was not your true reason for coming." He turned then and met my eye. "So what was?"

His gaze was so intense I couldn't look away. It was a challenge, I knew, but not a menacing one. "You know why I'm here," I said, trying to avoid being the one to say it aloud, but he, in the infuriating way that he had, remained silent and so forced the words out of me. "We're to be Bonded in five months, Draco. And I cannot get you to talk about it."

For that was the one subject in our letters on which Draco had always been silent. The few times I had tried to mention our Bonding, to draw out a conversation of it, to discover where we stood, he wrote his reply as if I'd made no mention of it. As if that sentence or paragraph had been erased from my letter before it had made it to him. This was his way, I'd discovered. When he didn't want to discuss something, he simply ignored it until I stopped mentioning it. Well, that worked in letters. But I wasn't about to let it work face to face. He was right; I had come to the manor with the intention of cornering him on this issue.

"Maybe you think this is something that can be thrown together in a month," I continued when he remained silent, "but—"

"I don't," he interrupted softly. He was silent for a moment longer, but then he spoke again. "You told me once that you lived for your seventeenth birthday because on that day, you could be free of me." I blushed and couldn't understand why he was bringing that up.

"That was a long time ago," I told him. "And the conversation has since been rendered irrelevant."

He shook his head and said, "You need to call off the Bonding, Astoria."

I froze at his words, unable to move. His blunt delivery caught me off guard, but I wasn't shocked by what he said. I think I had known he had been gearing up to that statement since I'd walked through the door. Possibly even since long before then. No, what he said did not shock me. It angered me.

"And why," I asked carefully, "would I do a thing like that?"

"Because you don't want to marry me."

It was the simple, straightforward way he said it that made my blood boil. The way that he had come to this conclusion all on his own and yet expected me to brook no argument. It was the surety in his voice that no other scenario was possible that truly made me angry.

"Just like I don't want you at my party?" I asked in a clipped voice, my hands clenched tightly at my sides. "I don't think that's what you really mean, Draco. I don't think you mean that I _don't_ want those things. I think you mean I _shouldn't_. I _shouldn't_ want you at my party. I _shouldn't_ want to marry you. Is that it?" It was a challenge, and he knew it. And he met it. He turned and looked me straight in the eye and said, "Yes."

There was pain and a sadness in the word, but I didn't hear it then. Or at least, I didn't acknowledge it. I heard only the challenge, and I responded with all the passion and the fury that my temper had to offer. "And here I thought you'd changed," I threw at him. "But no, you are still trying to dictate the world around you—"

"I am _trying_ —" he said loudly, cutting me off, and for just the slightest moment, he lost control of his carefully fixed mask. It slipped, and the anguish and turmoil I had seen so often in his letters shone through before he closed his eyes and brought that cool, reserved facade back into place. "I am trying," he repeated, quieter, "to ensure that the rest of your life is spent in a worthwhile manner. I am trying to keep you from being forced into shackles you've done nothing to earn."

"Are you trying to _rescue_ me?" I asked him, slightly incredulous. "Is that it? You're trying to _save_ me? Save me from a life spent on the fringes of society? And in this little world that you've dreamed up where I actually do what you're asking, what happens then? Pureblood society welcomes me back into its midst as its perfect little social butterfly, I marry wealth and power, and you fade slowly and silently into the background until I am so preoccupied with my picture perfect life that I allow you to disappear entirely?" He didn't answer. He didn't need to. The tightening of his jaw told me I wasn't far from the mark, and my anger and disbelief flared once more into brilliant life.

"Well, you've got it all worked out, haven't you?" I threw at him. "You've taken every element into consideration and come up with the perfect solution. Except that you've forgotten to take into account one very important thing, arguably the most important thing, and that's the fact that I love you!" He flinched away from that, like I'd pained him somehow, and I advanced on him, not willing to allow him any escape. "There. I've said it. I've said it, so you can't hide from it anymore. You can't ignore it, pretend that you haven't noticed, like you've been doing for months now. I love you, Draco, and I want to marry you, and standing in front of me and telling me I shouldn't isn't going to change that fact, and neither is your ridiculous attempt to convince yourself that I would actually prefer the future you've outlined for me!"

I was barely a meter from him, and he wouldn't look at me. His gaze was fixed resolutely out the window, but every inch of him was taunt, tensed. He was afraid, it suddenly hit me. What I was saying terrified him, but it didn't move me to pity. He would disappear if I backed off, and I couldn't let that happen. "You won't look into my eyes," I said, challenging him. "Are you scared of what you'll see? But what are you afraid of, Draco? That I'm telling the truth, or that I'm lying?"

It worked. He spun to face me so quickly that it caught me a little off guard. His calm facade was gone and I could see the fear, the panic, the turmoil in his eyes, and something else besides, something that gave me hope despite everything.

"I have nothing to offer you, Astoria," he said, spreading his arms wide. "A lifetime spent with me is a lifetime spent in isolation because my name is tainted and it will taint whoever bears it! For myself, I am resigned to it. It is no less than I deserve. But I will not see it forced upon another person. I will not see it forced upon you. I will not see you choose a prison! You must call off the Bonding!"

"No," I said in a voice as hard as steel. "If you want it called off so badly, you do it." He took half a step backward at the suggestion, as if shocked that I had made it. "If you truly believe that we are both better off with the Bonding dissolved, then you call it off, but you're going to have to, because I won't."

I looked straight into his eyes and forced him to look back so that he would see beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no lie in anything I was saying. "I have never cared what other people think, I have never cared about money or power, I have never cared about having a place in society. I have only ever cared about my own happiness and the only thing that has changed is that now I care about your happiness, too, and if I really thought you wanted this, wanted to live out the rest of your life alone, I might be persuaded to do as you ask. But I don't think you do. I think you are so terrified of what you're going to see in my eyes because you've fallen in love with me, too, and you want to spend the rest of your life with me as much as I want to spend mine with you, except that you've convinced yourself for some reason that you can't have that."

I stared him down, daring him to contradict me. He didn't. He held my gaze for a long moment, and then closed his eyes and looked away, his face filled with conflicted emotion. "Astoria, please," he whispered, but I shook my head even though he couldn't see it.

"I expect to see you at my party tonight," I told him. "And I expect to see you on June fifth, and if you try to disappear, I _will_ find you. I _will_ track you down, Ministry official in tow because I am _going_ to fight for this. I am _going_ to fight for what we both want because someone needs to. I refuse to give up on you that easily."

And I turned on my heel and left the manor.

I was distracted and preoccupied the rest of the day. My mind was not on my robe fitting or my hair dressing. I barely paid attention when my mother berated me for skipping off that morning. I replayed my conversation with Draco over and over in my mind. I'd put myself entirely out on the line, but I was certain I hadn't misread him. He loved me. He was doing his best to suppress it, but I had seen it. It was written between the lines of his letters and it had been spoken between his words that morning. He loved me. I just didn't know whether that would be enough to get him to my home that night.

I vacillated all day between being certain that he would come and knowing that he wouldn't. I was furious with him and heartbroken for him by turns. I agonized over whether I'd pushed him too far that morning or not far enough. It was frustrating and exhausting, but I was not in control of my mind. It jumped from point to point without pause, and would not be quieted by reason.

I had taken a gamble, challenging Draco the way I had, but I was confident that he wouldn't call off the Bonding. It would send a message completely against the new persona he was trying to craft. It would appear as if he was saying that he was too good for me. The world was determined to think the worst of him, and so no one but myself would read anything noble (however misguidedly so) into his actions. He wouldn't call off the Bonding.

I told myself that over and over again throughout the day: Even if Draco didn't come to the party, he wouldn't call off the Bonding.

 _But what if he does?_ whispered a voice in my head.

 _He won't_ , I argued.

 _He might,_ the voice said, pushing at my assumptions. _And even if he doesn't, will you really push him into a marriage he may or may not want?_

 _He'll want it once he's lived it,_ I tried to reason. _Even if he's hesitant now, he'll see sense in a month or two. He'll get used to it._

_So you'll force him to marry you, regardless of his wishes, just because he can't call things off for fear of what society will think. Doesn't that sound familiar._

The thought made me sick to my stomach, and I tried to push it away, but I couldn't. Was I really doing that to him? Was I really forcing onto him what I had been so desperate to escape not that long ago? And could I really go through with it now that I'd realized? How far was I willing to go in pursuit of what I wanted?

These thoughts plagued me, and I had no respite from them. Even once the party had started, my focus was no more present than it had been the rest of the day. I floated through the dances, my body taking over though my mind was not engaged. My partners talked at me, not to me, and I was barely aware they were speaking at all. I was looking past everyone, constantly, for the doors, waiting for him to walk in. Because if he walked in, then nothing else mattered. If he made the choice to come tonight, I could not be forcing him into anything.

But he didn't come. I grew more and more agitated as the night wore on. Daphne brought me to my senses a few times, with a sharp pressure on my elbow and a look of worry in her eyes. I tried to smile for her sake, but my heart wasn't in it. Finally, the final dance arrived, and my father was by my side, leading me onto the dance floor, and I was almost in tears because he wasn't there. At the end of the dance, my father was supposed to pass me off to my betrothed, the dance between us a silent, symbolic renewal of our vows. But he wasn't there. The dance with my father ended and the music changed and he backed away, and I was standing alone on the dance floor, with no one coming forward to take my hand.

I could feel their pity, and more, I could feel them laughing at me, my embarrassment just what I deserved in their minds for my stubborn refusal to detatch myself from that Malfoy boy, and I had the sudden feeling that this whole horrible evening had been for this one moment in my mother's eyes, to show me what my life would be like if I chose Draco. My anger at that thought cut through my self pity. And that was the moment that someone moved in the corner of my vision, coming up through the crowd to stand beside me.

"Come on, Astoria," Theo Nott, my sister's fiancé, said, holding his hand out to me. "As your brother." I stared at his offered hand, and I felt true gratitude toward him in that moment, for the out he was offering me. I could accept his dance as a sister and save face with all the assembled. I could communicate that I had no betrothed but was still loved. I could turn my back on Draco as he had seemingly turned his back on me. For a long moment, I considered it. It would be the easier choice, I knew.

"Thank you, Theo," I said softly, sincerely. "But you're not my betrothed." And then, louder, cutting harshly through the music so everyone could hear me, I said, "Go home. Go home, all of you. You all want to be here about as much as I do. The party's over. Just go home." And I turned on my heel and strode out of the ballroom, my mother's murderous glare following me the whole way.

My sister found me about ten minutes later, in a shadowy corner of a balcony off the ballroom, staring up at the falling snow as it melted on the invisible dome of enchantments keeping our garden warm in December. I felt numb despite the enchanted warmth, however, for at the end of it all, I couldn't believe he hadn't come.

"Well, that was quite the stunt," she said.

"It wasn't a stunt," I said wearily. "I've made my choice, Daphne. I will marry him or no one. I don't care what anyone says."

"Even though he didn't come?" Her words brought tears to the corners of my eyes.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "He's testing me. He's trying to get me angry enough with him that I'll do what he wants and call it all off. But I won't."

"Why not?" she asked me, coming to stand beside me. "Why put yourself through this?"

"Because," I said, incredibly tired. "I love him. I didn't always, but I do now. He is a good man, Daphne."

"Do you have any idea the kind of life you'll be living if you marry him?" she asked then. "He's an outcast, he's in disgrace. The number of places he can't show his face—"

"I don't care!" I yelled then, the pressure of the day spilling out of me, no longer willing to be contained. "I _don't care_! Why is it that when he was rich and powerful, everyone was clamoring for me to marry him, but now that he's fallen from grace, everyone is doing their level best to convince me to end it? Why is that what matters to all of you? Money and influence? Where have those things ever gotten this family? I care about what I have always cared about – what kind of person he is! And he has _changed_! He is a good man, and he is everything I never knew I needed! He understands me! I can talk to him! When I feel like the entire world is pressing down against me, he knows exactly what to say to keep me standing. And when I am acting like a spoiled child, he is the first to call me to task! He is dearer to me than anyone I have ever known, and for the first time in my life, I care about someone else's happiness as much as my own, and I don't want to lose that! When I am lucky enough to have found what every girl dreams of, why is the world demanding that I give it up?"

I was nearly in tears by the end of that, because the prospect of losing him was suddenly realer than it had ever been, and it terrified me. And then my sister's arms were around me, holding me close and offering reassurances. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to imply – I do understand," she said softly, and I knew that she did.

"But, Astoria, what if he calls things off? What if he goes through with it?"

I wanted to cry out that I would fight him with my dying breath and follow him to the ends of the earth if that's what it took, but the words died in my throat because, hearing the question voiced outside of my own head, I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't force him into a life that would make him miserable. And so, miserably, I said, "Then I'll let him go."

It was the hardest thing I've ever had to admit, and I think it took my sister by surprise. "You would?" she asked, and I nodded, not bothering to hold back the tears.

"If he calls it off, he's made a choice. And I'll respect it, though I will regret him every day of my life. I meant what I said, Daphne. I will marry him or no one. I've made my choice. I just have to wait for him to make his."

"Is that enough for you," my sister called out then, and her tone had changed drastically, "or do you still, somehow, need more?" I was utterly bewildered until I realized that she wasn't talking to me. A shadowy figure came up the stairs that led down into the garden behind me.

"You know, Daphne," the figure said evenly, "you would fail utterly at espionage."

"Then it's a good thing I don't plan on making that my career," she said shortly. "I've done what you asked. The rest is up to you." And with a squeeze to my arm, she left me alone with him.

I had stiffened instinctively when I realized who was there, and that he'd been listening to my conversation, and that, somehow, my sister had helped to orchestrate it. I could feel my anger growing, but I wasn't sure who exactly I was angry with.

As if he'd read my mind, he said, "Don't be upset with your sister. She found me, and I made her swear secrecy."

"How long have you been here?" I demanded, finally turning to face him.

"About an hour," he said softly.

"I was humiliated out there," I told him. "I waited for you to show up, and you didn't. You left me standing there alone."

"Yes," he said softly.

"What was all this supposed to be about?" I asked. "Getting Daphne to get me alone so you could eavesdrop, leaving me stranded in the dance floor. What were you trying to prove?"

"I had to see what you do would when confronted with the pressures of society and offered a way out," he said softly. "And I had to hear what you would say when asked the pertinent questions when I wasn't around."

"You were _testing_ me?" I asked incredulously.

"It is easy to make grand statements," he said apologetically. "Acting on them is the real challenge." I was going to retort as soon as I could formulate the words, but he spoke again before I could, likely sensing my indignation. "Forgive me," he said. "On any other subject, I would have taken you at your word, without question. But this . . . It is difficult to believe that anyone would give up a full, rich life for the life I have to offer."

I wanted to smack him about the back of the head because he still didn't get it. He still didn't understand. "It is not a question of choosing one lifestyle over another," I told him. "It is choosing a life that has you in it. We could live in a shack for all I care, without a penny to our names, and as long as you were there with me, I wouldn't care."

"But I will not always be there," he said. "The work I do, well, it is only fair that you know."

"You work for the Ministry," I interrupted, voicing what I had figured out long ago. "For the Aurors and Harry Potter. You follow Dark wizards and supposedly reformed Dark wizards around the world to monitor their actions and report to the Aurors of any suspicious behavior." He stared at me.

"How did you know?" he asked. I shrugged.

"I guessed."

"I dearly hope you are the only who has done so," he said, and there was a note of sternness in his voice.

"I am," I assured him. "I doubt anyone else cares enough. I take it that was part of the price of your freedom?" He offered a crooked little smile at that.

"No," he said. "Potter vouched for us and secured our freedom before he made me the offer. He is . . . above blackmail." There was a grudging, almost resentful respect in his voice when he spoke of his old enemy. "He is not above guilt tripping, but he is above blackmail." I laughed at that, and he shared the moment with me before growing serious once more. "The point," he said then, "is that I will often be gone. The trips I am sent on may be as long as this one has been, or longer."

"Then we will have letters," I told him. "They have served us well the past year and a half." I was starting to sway him, I could tell, but he was still not quite willing to leap.

"It will not be an easy life," he warned me, and I had to laugh.

"Draco, my life has never been easy," I told him. "I don't think I'd know what to do with myself if it became so now. Besides," I said, looking him straight in the eye and using his own words against him, "I do not think an easier life would be worth the tradeoff." I won him with that, I could see it in his eyes. Yet still, he searched for some other argument, some other warning that might yet change my mind. So I spoke before he could find it. "Draco, do you not want to marry me? Forget everything else for just a moment, for my sake, and answer that. Do you not want to marry me? Do you not love me?"

He stared at me. "Not love you?" he repeated. "How on earth could I not love you?" My breath caught in my throat at those words and the intensity of his look. "Astoria Greengrass, you astound me. After all I have done, after all the burdens I have handed you and the ways I have treated you, your capacity to forgive and overcome and overlook . . . I do not know what I have done to deserve it. And I am still not convinced that I do. Of course, of _course_ I love you."

"Do you believe that that is enough?" I asked him then.

"I do not know," was his soft and troubled reply.

"Well, I believe it enough for both of us, if you'll let me."

He held my gaze for a long moment, then voiced his last worry, his last line of defense. "I could not bear it if, because of me, you lived a life you one day came to regret," he confessed in a whisper. "There is a darkness inside me, Astoria. For I have seen too much and been a part of too much, and darkness never really goes away once you've seen it. I fear that darkness more than anything else. I fear it hurting the people I love."

I took his hand then, the first physical contact we had had since his sixteenth birthday. He stared down at my fingers touching his as I told him, "That darkness is in me as well, as it is in most people. Because you recognize it, you have less to fear from it. And I would regret most of all the life lived without love. It will not be easy. It will be a struggle every day, I would imagine. But we will get through it together, and someday, I know, all of the struggles will pay off."

He held my hand tightly then and closed his eyes. I could see the war playing out in the lines of his face, and I knew there was nothing more I could do or say to sway the outcome. In the end, it had to be left up to him. Those were the longest moments of my life, but when he finally opened his eyes, locked his gaze with mine, and nodded, I had never been happier.

"Astoria," he whispered, and I looked to him expectantly. "I would like very much to kiss you," he told me. "Yet, I am recalling a . . . rather fervent promise that you made to me once, and I would greatly like to avoid the consequences you mentioned then." I smiled.

"I think, sir, that you should worry more about the consequences if you do not kiss me right now." And with a smile, he did. And it was gentle and sweet and perfect.

We were interrupted by music coming out of the near-empty ballroom behind us, the song I had failed to dance to. Draco and I turned as one to see Daphne silhouetted in the doorway. "The orchestra had not yet packed up," she said. "I thought I might give you one more chance at your betrothal dance."

I looked to Draco, and he held his hand out to me. "Will you do me the honor?" he asked.

I placed my hand in his and said, "I will."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've enjoyed these characters I've crafted and want to read more about them and the world in which Scorpius grew up, you should know that this was a prequel of sorts to my story Fighting Briars. Both this Draco and this Astoria make appearances in that tale, as does the Bonding tradition.

_Part the Seventh_

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The day that Draco turned 21, we were married. My parents did not attend. My sister did, though, and she and her husband served as our witnesses. The only other person in attendance was Draco's mother. She looked at me with something distinctly like pride and gratitude that day, and I couldn't bring myself to mind that my mother was not there.

Four years later, early in the spring, when Draco was nearly 26 and I was all of 23, our son was born.

He was delivered at home, and Draco was by my side for the entire labor and birth. But when little Scorpius let out his first cry and was laid into my arms, Draco disappeared into the shadows. I was too caught up in the beautiful perfection of my baby boy to notice at first, but then I reached for my husband's hand to find that he was no longer there. I tore my eyes away from Scorpius's face and searched for Draco.

He was half hidden by shadows, but the terror on his face was plain as day, and it nearly broke my heart. Not the fact that the birth of his son instilled that terror, but because even after eight years, he was still deeply afraid of the love he held for others. For that was his darkness. He would always, I knew, fear the love he had to give because he knew firsthand the capacity that his love had to cause pain and hardship. As he stood in the shadows and looked from afar at his son, I knew he was playing out the life his child would lead and the hardships his child would face simply because he bore the name of Malfoy.

"Draco," I called gently, and held my hand out to him. He met my gaze, and a silent understanding passed between us. Together, was what I said without speaking, and it was enough. "Come," I said aloud. "Come meet your son."

When I placed my son into the arms of his father and saw that deep-rooted, instantaneously love light up his face, I knew every hardship had been worth it. And when he tore his eyes away from Scorpius to find mine, I knew my husband knew it, too. And whatever hardships were yet to come, we would face and overcome them together.

Someday, I will tell these stories to my son, so that he might understand who his father is and where he came from and what it truly means to be a Malfoy in this new world, to fight with every inch of your being for the right to be happy. To pursue what you want, no matter what stands in your way. To force the world to see your character, not just your name. To fight against life's briars with perseverance and determination because nothing that is worth having in the world can be gotten without a few small scrapes along the way. And as the world turns 'round, it will heal those scrapes until the pain of them has passed into mere memory and all that remains are the rewards that the battles brought. Draco Malfoy taught me these things, and I truly believe, with all my heart, that the world is better because we chose to live a harder life, and I will do whatever it takes to pass that message on.

_Fin_

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

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